[Dixielandjazz] Late Pre-Jazz

[ROBERT R. CALDER]

Quite a while ago, I was sent a CD by the bassist John Patitucci and friends for review.I could actually have seen them perform the material, I was in London when they were --but at a ticket price beyond my pocket!!! 
In any event my brow wrinkled when I read another review.Its author spoke of an admirable jazz CD. I fear I include as jazz a lot more than do some worthy fellow-constituents, but I recall having denied that that was a jazz CD, before seeing anybody (other than trying to flog -- or marklet -- the thing) assert otherwise. 
It was -- it is a collection of performances in genres ranging from Ibero-American to North American Protestant hymnody, to I suppose Ravel (I can mention him, because Jimmy McPartland once identified Ravel -- I think to Charles Fox -- as his hero) probably extracted or divorced from jazz practice and organised to match what was expected in such genres around the year 2001 or so. 
Nice enough stuff, I thought and think, and with an appeal for some jazz enthusiasts, but short on some things. 
There seems to have been a trend in that direction. 
As a friend of mine once observed about Morris dancing, it doesn't however swing. 
It wasn't, as I gather Beethoven said (in German) "unbuttoned". 

Of course there is a lot of pre-jazz around on what was recorded before 1917, but it's at best borderline, and there is really no beginning date. 
I suppose it has a lot to do with whether the singularity of messrs. Maestri Bechet and Armstrong rang bells in souls that could find implications to work out and work with 

but I don't suppose promoters of the expert bassist's CD which I reviewed several years before yesterday would take "the latest things in pre-jazz" as a welcome sales-pitch! 

Robert R. Calder
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